ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"Both these buildings were Boston high-rises when they were built.

The older one, seven stories tall in an era without elevators, has been called Boston's first skyscraper. More often it's called the Pagoda Building, in honor of the theatrical Chinese temple shape at the top.

In both photos, we're at the corner of State and Washington streets, looking north toward what is today Boston City Hall. The Pagoda was built about 1850. The architect was a r...

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"Both these buildings were Boston high-rises when they were built.

The older one, seven stories tall in an era without elevators, has been called Boston's first skyscraper. More often it's called the Pagoda Building, in honor of the theatrical Chinese temple shape at the top.

In both photos, we're at the corner of State and Washington streets, looking north toward what is today Boston City Hall. The Pagoda was built about 1850. The architect was a recent immigrant from Britain named George Snell. He also designed the Boston Music Hall, which still exists as the Orpheum rock palace. The Pagoda's upper six stories were residential, including the spectacular Oriental penthouse at the top. The ground floor was originally leased to a haberdasher. We think the Pagoda was demolished in the 1920s.

In the new photo, we're looking at 28 State Street, which opened in 1971 as the New England Merchants Bank building. In 1972, it received the annual Parker Medal as the most beautiful building of the year in Greater Boston. The architect was Edward Larrabee Barnes, perhaps best known for his Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Like many modernists, Barnes liked clean, simple shapes and surfaces, which, when stretched to the scale of an office tower, can seem forbidding.

'A building cannot be a human building unless it is a complex of smaller buildings or smaller parts which manifest its own internal social facts,'' wrote British theorist Christopher Alexander. That's the perfect description of the Pagoda. It's human in other ways, too: with its hatlike top, it actually resembles a person.

The 28 State building makes equally clear statements, but they're the opposite of the Pagoda's. The architecture speaks of the anonymity and interchangeability of office lessees and inhabitants. Anything can go anywhere in this building. It does, however, respond to its context with its warm-toned reddish granite and its handsome pedestrian arcade, which links the Old State House, just behind us on the right, with Boston City Hall and its plaza."